March 2010

Mar 23, 2010

For Mac users, software bundles are a hit. The idea is simple: you pay a small price and get about 10 times as much in software. The package is fixed, so you don't have a choice. Some bundles even promise to donate a portion of the income to charity. The most famous is MacHeist, but other sites followed like MacUpdate and others. I'm really not familiar with similar concepts for other OSs, but I'm sure there are.

I am really struggling with this concept. It's a mixed bag and I thought I'd share my cons and pros, just to understand what I missed.

User Perspective

From the user standpoint, it's a bargain. You get tons of good apps for a fraction of the cost and, it's legal. In most cases, the bundle includes several products which cost alone more than the bundle itself. For example, in the current MUPromo Spring Bundle, you get 11 apps including Parallels Desktop for $50 whereas Parallels alone costs $80.

I purchased a MacHeist bundle about 2 years ago and I am very happy with this decision. I still use some of the apps I got like CSSEdit, Pixlemator, Typinator, Speed Download and AppZapper. For me, it was well worth the $32. For example, I paid $50 when I purchased TextMate alone, so you can understand the difference.

Since then, I've been following the MacHeist and other bundles, waiting for the next bundle that will be worth buying and I still didn't find any. Why? Maybe it's because most of my needs are already met. If I need to "scratch the itch", I find a solution, either free or paid. Maybe it's just stuff I don't really need. I have a simple rule in life: I don't buy bargains because they are bargains. I buy the stuff I need and, if I can find a bargain for it, great. It's a bit like throwing the darts and then painting the target where they hit.

So, why you shouldn't buy a bundle:

You get stuff you don't need and you will be inclined to install it. Some apps will just waste disk space. However. there are apps that will have a negative impact on your machine's performance. One such example is Clips from the latest MacHeist bundle.

You might not get the best tools for the job: on occasion, the apps you get in the bundle are inferior to other apps on the market. However, you will probably be using them anyway because you already paid, instead of buying the better product.

In most cases, the bundles are offering many applications for a limited time. This does not offer enough time to properly evaluate each product.

The last bullet can be further emphasized when it comes to "24 hour sales" which I especially dislike. I already bought two products in such sales (PathFinder and ExpanDrive), just to discover later down the road that their performance and quality makes them unusable for me.

So, what do you think? I'm interested in hearing your take as users. I will complete this article by covering the developers' perspective. If you are reading this post and you are a developer which participated in such a sale, drop me a line.

Mar 03, 2010

I am an RSS addict (used to work with Bloglines, switched for Google Reader). I consume most of my news and articles through RSS. Once I got my hands on an iPhone, it was only natural that I would search for a decent RSS Reader. I got some recommendations and tried several apps. I couldn't try the paid apps, since there are no trial versions, so I had to follow screenshots and reviews.

Google Reader provides an internet application for reading feeds. I use it. My main rant is that it is just too slow, takes too long to navigate, and just consumes too much of my time.

I have about 200 feeds. Naturally, I never get to most of them. I would classify my feeds in the following categories:

"Read immediately" feeds: I usually read those every couple of hours. They include mostly monitor feeds to forums. This is an important tool for web marketing: once a question pops up in a forum, I want to answer it first.

"Read daily" feeds: I read those in the morning. Sometimes in the evening. Includes about 10+ feeds in various areas of interest, plus...

"Services" feeds: feeds from services I use and need to stay on top of updates.

"Read when you have time" feeds: I get to those less often, if I really need to take a break from what I'm doing or over evenings/weekends.

"Weekend" feeds: mostly leisure feeds like cooking, comics, etc.

"Keep an eye on" feeds: there are many feeds which are not updated that often. They should be out of the way, unless something new comes up.

"Dinosaurs": the ones I never read anymore but can't be bothered to remove.

The feeds are organized in folders by topics like TechNews, Gadgets, Productivity, Fun Stuff, etc. I'm not going to reorganize them, I really like it the way it is.

During my extensive years of RSS-reading (I started using a feed reader about 6+ years ago), I perfected the ability to quickly skim through articles and quickly understand if I'm interested. The "mark as read" feature is one of the most important tasks of a good reader. It should be done with minimal effort from the user side and be part of the natural flow of reading the feed. I should not be forced to manually "mark as read".

Let's start by laying down some base requirements.

Must Have

Sync with Google Reader.

Very quick. Especially to load.

Automatic and natural "mark as read" which works as you skim through the feed.

Load images (resized).

Work in portrait and landscape.

Support folders.

Built-in browser which works in landscape mode.

Simple navigation - in and out of feeds/folders.

Very simple "mark as unread" for those article I will want to read from my laptop.

Remember last position when open.

Nice to Have

Read it Later integration. I use it, but not that much (it's more like "read it never").

Customize the UI: allow me to rearrange my feeds or select more important feeds just for iPhone viewing.

Show me article preview inline: I would like to read it almost as I read it in the full version of Google Reader, but with smaller articles. Giving just the headline is usually not enough. Let me customize that.

Progressive or conditional sync. I don't want to wait until all my feeds are synced.

Must not Have (or don't care)

Ads. I want to pay for a decent app.

Show all the feeds in a given folder together: I don't read all the feeds at the same time.

Favorite, share, note - it might have those, but I don't use them. I keep the interesting articles as "unread".

Edit feeds (add, remove, move) - I do that from my laptop.

Offline mode: I spend most of my time connected. I have Read it Later for offline reading.

Eye candies are not required: I like it simple. It should look good, but not extravagant.

Now, I had a great idea for an awesome reader, so here goes. I love TweetDeck. I love the column view, going in-and-out, organizing columns, adding, etc. It just works. I want something similar, for my feeds.

In this app, you cannot have just one deck of columns, you will have multiple decks. You start from you dashboard and select a deck. Each deck contains columns. Each column can show articles from a specific feed or folder (perhaps multiple feeds/folders). There may be other type of columns like "likes" and "shares" (I don't really use those), even search results.

By default, each deck is a folder. However, you may rearrange and create new decks (without affecting the data in Google Reader). For example, I will have decks for "Immediate", "Daily", "Weekly", etc.

Ideally, one should be able to control, for each deck or column, how often it is updated (limiting the sync means faster loading) and some display properties like whether to preview full articles or headlines only.

One thing I would add on top of TweetDecks' UI is the ability to "expand in place" like the Google Reader web UI provides. Click on an item preview to expand it to a larger preview in place. A different icon or click can show the full item in a separate screen.

There are two important points to notice here:

The organization of feeds on my laptop is not necessarily the same on my phone. Navigation is much easier on my laptop.

Having columns means you get "at a glance" view of what's updates. You can zoom into a column, skim through it by swiping down. Then, swipe left and return to the previous column. You can spend a less than a minute figuring out what's new and more on with your life.

Well, if you have any recommendations for an RSS reader that might just fit me, let me know. If you intend to built my ideal reader, please do it quickly. My money is waiting for you. I would gladly pay $10 for such an app. Any takers?